Conventional mathematical tools, such as such as MATLAB™ from Math Works™, Inc., of Natick, Mass., provide a comprehensive technical computing environment for performing numerical linear algebraic calculations, solving ordinary differential equations, analyzing data, and visualizing solutions to complex mathematical formulas by generating graphs or other images. The computing environment often provides a high-level programming language that includes a variety of operators and programming commands.
Engineers use such mathematical tools for a variety of applications such as designing complex mechanical and electrical control systems, solving optimization problems and performing statistical analysis. Engineers often use these mathematical tools in conjunction with a simulation tool for defining and simulating complex mathematical models. For example, manufacturers of mechanical and electronic systems, e.g., cars and integrated circuits, use simulation tools to help them design their products. These tools allow designers to build and test mathematical models of their systems before building a physical prototype. Commercial simulation models can be extremely complex and may include thousands of interconnected functional blocks. Using a simulation tool, a designer can simulate and observe changes in a model over a period of time, typically represented as a series of discrete instants, called time steps, such as 1 millisecond, 1 second, 2 hours, etc. Starting from a set of initial conditions, specified by the designer, the simulation tool drives the model and determines the state of the model at various time steps.
To examine and present information generated by the technical computing environment and the simulation tool, designers often create several types of reports. Because commercial models are so complex, the designer can create a myriad of reports, each report serving a particular purpose. Typical reports include, for example, a title, the name of the author, a brief text description of the report, a legend, and, of course, the actual data drawn from the model during simulation. Many of these elements are fixed while others vary over time when the simulation data in the model changes.
A designer, therefore, faces many tradeoffs when designing a report including determining the structure of the report, specifying the fixed elements and the varying elements of the report and where they should be positioned. This can be particularly difficult for varying elements because it requires that the designer extract data from the model while the simulation is running. Often, the designer wishes to generate a report for a particular state of the model, or time step associated with the simulation. This can be difficult because simulations often take many hours to complete. In addition, the designer must save the report in a format convenient to run the same report multiple times and that can be easily shared with others. Many conventional simulation programs and modeling tools exist that have limited ability to generate reports. However, most report generator programs provide only a small number of reports, and allow, at most, only certain limited customization such as changing the title of the report and the name of the author.